We’ve had a few questions in the past week about a pending Google smackdown… also known as an algorithm change… that will happen in January. This one relates to those annoying and intrusive interstitials. As with all of these types of changes, this one is designed to improve the user experience. And it applies to mobile users.
What the Heck is an Interstitial?
While you might not recognize the name, you’ve surely seen it.
Interstitials are those super annoying pop-ups that make you feels as if your search has been hijacked. They are displayed before (and sometimes after) you reach your expected content page. Sometimes they are ads and sometimes they are boxes used for other purposes.
For example, I’m a devoted Southern Living magazine reader. While it would be great to read their content online on my iPad or iPhone when I’m trying to relax after a long day of content wrangling, their site is riddled with pop-ups. It almost always wreaks havoc on my device.
People just don’t like it when they can’t see the content they were trying to access. And Google doesn’t like it when users can’t access the content they want.
Here’s the direct quote from Google Webmaster:
Here are some examples of techniques that make content less accessible to a user:
- Showing a popup that covers the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page.
- Displaying a standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content.
- Using a layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone interstitial, but the original content has been inlined underneath the fold.
You can read the whole article here.
How Does this Impact Your Senior Living Website?
For most of you, this won’t make a difference. Very few senior living communities use these ads. We see them with most often with home care providers who are trying to promote their tech products.
Where we have noticed them on senior living websites is to encourage email subscriptions. Some of the small senior living communities have added a plug-in to their website to try to encourage visitors to subscribe to their blog. And it was a highly effective method of capturing those folks. Until now.
So you will have to make sure your 2017 strategy includes quality CTAs that encourage visitors to subscribe!
Keep the questions coming folks! You can use our nifty contact form to send them on over for us to answer in a future post.